As the Coronavirus pandemic still ravages the globe, many companies now require employees to work from home. In most cases, this places the onus on team members to stay organized and productive when working in a home office. This sometimes becomes difficult when considering the distractions from family members and/or pets.
With an eye towards increasing your productivity when telecommuting, here are a few online tools to help you stay organized. These utilities are a great help, especially if your company doesn’t provide any software for this purpose. In fact, managers need to consider them for all their direct reports.
Of course, a videoconferencing app is essential to stay connected with your coworkers when working remotely. Skype and Zoom get a lot of publicity in the professional videoconferencing marketplace for good reasons. However, if you or your company is interested in an open-source option, consider Jitsi. The application is easy to use and provides superior performance.
Those well-attended brainstorming sessions in an office with a whiteboard are definitely missed in a work from home environment. Thankfully, there’s Drawpile, a collaborative drawing application suitable for business. It helps your team easily craft innovative ideas in a collaborative and organized fashion.
Joplin is essentially a virtual notebook suitable for tracking your current to-do list. It supports simple note-taking, creating task lists, and even allows the importing of graphics. You are also able to synchronize your notes with any number of online storage options.
If your team needs a collaborative chat application, Microsoft Teams is one valid choice. Some companies prefer an open-source option, and Riot offers similar functionality for these organizations. Using the popular Matrix protocol for real-time communication, Riot provides support for many popular chat features, like instant messaging, emoji, and the sharing of images. It’s an inexpensive way to foster teamwork among a group of telecommuters.
Many companies use spreadsheets for reasons beyond math. In fact, they are great for organizing task lists. Ethercalc is an online open-source spreadsheet app that makes it easy for teams to share their work. It also supports most of the popular spreadsheet formats, like Microsoft Excel.
If your company needs help building a great tech team, speak with the experts at Technology Partners. As one of the best IT staffing agencies in St. Louis, we provide the top candidates able to help your company succeed. Schedule a meeting with us soon.